158 Business View - November 2015
student body, the city, the community- at-large, and the
fan base, nationwide, on ‘What’s the best way to rebuild
this corner? Do we want to put it back exactly like it was,
or do we want to do something a little bit different?’” While
the university rebuilt its corner and planted two live oaks
to replace the ones that were lost, Ballard explains that it
wasn’t responsible for the intersection, itself, or the three
other corners which were controlled by the city.
Meanwhile, the City of Auburn was a participant in the
Urban Sustainability Accelerator Program, run out of Port-
land State University. Ballard explains: “It’s a program to
facilitate and accelerate a city’s aspirations for sustain-
ability directly through project implementation. What they
do is help you identify projects in your capital improvement
projects plan and approach those projects in a more sus-
tainable way. They encourage you to look at projects from
the very beginning and see how you can take a more sus-
tainable approach to those projects and still attain your
principal objectives.”
The city identified two principal objectives it wanted to ac-
complish with the Program’s support: alternative trans-
portation and storm water management – and Toomer’s
Corner was a perfect place to accomplish both of them.
“So one of the first projects that we took on was the Toom-
er’s Intersection project,” says Ballard. “We’ve known for
awhile that we’ve got an aging infrastructure in our down-
town area and we knew that we would be needing to re-
place that infrastructure, soon. So, we identified not just
the replacing of the infrastructure, but revamping the in-
tersection in its entirety to meet some of our sustainable
aspirations.”
Ballard explains how the project helped promote alterna-
tive transportation: “We’re a thriving college town. We felt
that as our urban core grows and changes that we needed
to maintain that pedestrian and bicycle-friendly environ-
ment. We want people to come downtown. We want peo-
ple to walk and enjoy downtown. For pedestrian enhance-
ments, the biggest change was a raised intersection as
INFRASTRUCTURE
